Book review | Rotters by Daniel Kraus

 

You’d think that being a teenager transplanted from Chicago to Iowa would be bad enough, but Joey Crouch’s troubles run deep. Joey spends the first 16 years of his life in Chicago with his single mother, Valerie, eking out a respectably nerdy existence with his pal Boris and fellow band kids. But when his mother is struck by a bus while crossing the street—the result of hearing loss in her left ear, a mysterious injury possibly caused by Joey’s absentee father—he’s sent to live with that father in a shack in southeast Iowa.

He quickly discovers his dad is the town joke, known as the “Garbageman,” though he doesn’t work for Streets and San. As Joey adjusts to a rough high-school existence as the Garbageman’s kid—he’s nicknamed “Crotch,” beaten daily by jocks and held up as a flawed specimen by his biology teacher—his home life is worse. His dad, who rarely deigns to even provide food, reveals his true occupation: gravedigger. He schools Joey in the art and sophistry of plucking rings from corpses’ fingers, and Joey reluctantly embraces his innate talent.

This is Chicago author Kraus’s second grim young-adult novel, and what it lacks in style—a stiffly formal language pervades—it makes up for in atmospherics. A refreshing take on the teenage outsider story, and bolstered by a rich and inventive legend, Rotters ably tells a horror story set above and below ground.